The Common Commoner

barsoomcore · Aug 17, 2004

Numion said:
Still, taking rules that mainly deal with dungeondelving with a party of four extraordinary heroes and extrapolating those to world at large is pretty dumb.

Fair enough, but it's not stupid to assume that laws of reality apply to everyone in reality.

This is just hand-waving the problem away -- which is a fine response, no kidding, but that's what it is. Nowhere do the rules say "Oh, and other people in the world have a completely different set of rules about how magic works," so it's reasonable to assume that such rules as are detailed apply to NPCs as well as PCs.

For a DM who wants to create a consistent, believable world in which D&D rules apply, there are some significant decisions that need to be made, decisions that have massive implications on the nature of the world.

For example:

kigmatzomat said:
I will point out that according to the PHB, accidents & disease excluded, the average person will live to about 90. In our world, old age claims people much closer to the 80s, so I think it could be said the default setting assumes magic has some impact on longevity.

Exactly. And any increase in average longevity will cause a corresponding increase in overall population. If people are living longer, there will be more people. Which will lead to a non-medieval setting.

Monster Attacks: Suggesting that your average settlement gets attacked twice a day by deadly monsters is insupportable. Who would live in such a place? The typical response from successful cultures throughout the world to such incursions is massive retaliation to stomp out the offenders once and for all. What good is it living near some defending lord if goblins walk in once a day and injure or kill people? By the time the lord's forces arrive the damage is already done. The way to make a place livable is to send out a party of tough guys to wipe out the enemy. Even encountering such creatures once a WEEK would be cause for panic and either immediate "pacification" of the region or abandonment.

Just the rumour of attack is usually enough in our world to send thousands of people fleeing for their lives.

If orcs were competing with humans for resources, history certainly suggests that humans at least would settle for nothing less than complete eradication of the orc race. And since orcs are actually the evil ones, presumably they wouldn't even settle for that.

There's just no way that people would live under those conditions. Either they would leave and live somewhere less incredibly dangerous, or they would organize a pre-emptive defense to make the area safe.

And if we assume that instead, the villagers would remain, and gain levels from successfully fighting off monsters, doesn't that put an end to the "commoners have no access to magic above 1st level" argument? A 9th-level adept has 3rd-level spells, and if Toothless Joe the commoner can be 9th level, why not Mumbling Fred the adept? I mean, either these are low-level people -- in which case they get wiped out by monster attacks consistently -- or they're higher-level people -- in which case they can resist the monster attacks but end up encountering higher-level magic as a matter of course.

Note that a band of 30-100 orcs includes 3 7th-level barbarians, 5 5th-level barbarians and a 3rd-level barbarian for every 10 orcs. These guys are going wipe your average village or thorp off the map. That's 30 orcs -- a force like that could cut a massive swath through any kingdom populated the way this thread suggests.

The point is that pretending that deadly incursions will keep populations levels down ignores typical responses IRL to such dangers -- either put an end to the danger, whatever the cost may be, or flee. In no case would most people accept living in such regions.

Withholding spells: Spellcasters in D&D have NO REASON not to use every spell they get every day of their life. None. Saying "It's exhausting" is just making stuff up. The rules don't impose any penalties for casting spells. You aren't fatigued because you just cast a spell. I guess a wizard might have something better to do daily than memorize a bunch of spells (but honestly, what wizard would ever take the chance that TODAY they won't need a spell ready?), but I find it unlikely. Or at least sub-optimal. And the other classes have even less rationale for not maximising their spell-casting.

This is part of where my "Paranoia Theorem" comes from. The Paranoia Theorem states that according to D&D rules of magic, the most successful method for a sorcerer is complete paranoia. Sorcerers do best by practicing complete paranoia -- trusting no one and arranging the destruction of everyone who might possibly be a threat. Of course many sorcerers won't be good enough at it, will get caught and recognized for what they are and destroyed before they can succeed, but the laws of probability suggest that sometime somebody's going to combine the lethal qualities of intelligence, charisma, and complete paranoia and be able to wipe out all threats to their existence.

Because the power of sorcerers depends on nothing outside of themselves. They cannot be stopped by social pressure -- not if they're sufficiently clever and cautious.

I'll grant you that "sufficient" is a very very large amount of cleverness and caution, but there exists an amount that if possessed would mean a sorcerer is literally untouchable and will be able to act at will. The only force that could stop such a character would be a god. In particular, a god in a campaign setting where mortals cannot make themselves into gods.

Sorcerers, therefore, who do not prepare new spells as soon as they can, will get eliminated by their more paranoid brethern -- who are watching for exactly those opportunities. They would do the same to wizards (the Paranoia Theorem applies less well to wizards because their spellbooks can be taken away from them), and anyone else that looked like a threat.

Eventually you have a world where a small number of extremely powerful sorcerers maintain constant vigilance, gathering as much power as they can and denying all resources to their rivals. They would simply wipe out entire civilizations if they could -- they have no use for peasants, and such resources might provide armies that would be turned against them. Better to kill them all.

It's interesting to me because it provides a rational explanation for the standard "destroy the world" ploy of BBEGs. It's actually the optimal path for a sorcerer to follow -- you best assure your own survival by killing every other being in the world. Barsoom is the campaign that grew out of this line of thinking -- it's a nasty place, that for most people is not only low-magic, it's NO-magic -- but what magic does exist is immensely powerful. It's just specifically targetted at wiping you out.

Where did I start all this? Huh.

The Grumpy Celt · Aug 17, 2004

Dwarf Bread said:
I forget...what's the primary stat for a nightsoil collector?

Charisma. You know them thar' nightsoil collectors are a big bunch of mack-daddies.

I'm A Banana · Aug 17, 2004

Monsters

Yeah, the 2/day rule is an extrapolation from rules that give you a 10% per hour chance for an adventuring party. It's not exactly airtight.

That said, I still think it's an extremely useful situation to explain why the population *doesn't* skyrocket because of the availability of healing. Monsters are more than common; they're likely. People die every day, and the fields are always at risk. The exact number doesn't matter, as long as you realize that a settlement faces these risks very often.

Why don't they just move somewhere else? They can't. Anywhere they move, they will have encounters that they can earn XP from 2/day. You think they should move to a less dangerous area? There isn't any less dangerous area. Especially not that they can still farm and supply a city off of. You move to the urban area, you've got slimes in the sewers. You move to the arctic, you got remorhaz in the barn. You move to the jungle, you've got dinosaurs in the well. You move to the desert, you've got mostrous scorpions. Everyplace. In the entire world. Is this dangerous. And the desolate, uninhabited areas, where the chance for random encounter is effectively 0? You think you could feed a family, let alone a viallage in a place where the necromancer king doesn't even keep an outpost? There are scores of D&D creatures that don't even need food to live, a desolate, uninhabited area is a true anomoly, and likely the result of magical corruption itself, rather than anything natural. There is no place without monsters. Noplace.

Now about the XP. There are a few reasons that the less talented spellcasters gain XP slower than that 9th level commoner. And it hinges on the only thouroughly codified way of gaining XP in D&D: risking your life in encounters. Encounters that don't risk your life don't give XP, and it is assmued that encounters that *do* risk the lives of at least a few people in the town give XP to those who risk their lives happen about 2/day. That figure is very flexible, but it's based on the current rules...adjust it as you see reasonable. I, for one, see the 2/day figure as suggested by the rules to be *very* reasonable.

Now, not everyone in the town responds to a single attack. That 9th level commoner can handle a goblin or two without calling in the militia. He doesn't gain much XP for it anymore, but he did back in the day -- when he was 1st level, and he was meeting his first goblin, and he called in the militia, and he helped fight it off, and he gained the XP for the encounter. But 95%+ of the people in the town didn't bother with the encounter, so they don't gain the XP. Only the folks who did it gain it. That commoner gained XP. The rest of 'em didn't.

That 9th level commoner is one who has seen more than a few conflicts. But there are people just as old in the town who haven't seen even one conflict. The first level commoners, for instance. They've seen goblins, they've heard of them, but they've never faught one. That 9th level commoner, has.

Now, the spellcasters need to respond to a fight less than the militia. The warriors, the commoners, for the most part (maybe a few experts) and a handful of PC-classed protectors. Their spells are not nessecarily immediately useful in the fight, and even if they are, the spellcasters are generally much more frail and much less effective than warriors. In addition, the commoners have fields to protect; large expanses of food. The spellcasters, comparatively, only have their home, likely near the center of town, often publically protected (the militia will respond to a threat to the temple). This is because the service that they provide is rarer than the service the commoner provides...there are maybe three people who know cure light wounds. The town isn't going to risk these by putting them at the fringes and demanding they defend themselves. The adept who's lived in the town for a slong as that 9th level commoner has seen far less danger and action in his 60 years than Toothless Joe, because he doesn't have food to protect (he gets fed by serving the town), he is protected by others, and he is too vital a force in the town to risk (while commoners will be, well, more common.

). Not only that, but he'd be less useful in direct combat than the warriors, so there's no reason to call him to battle. Use him before to bless, or after to heal, but not during...this means that the adept doesn't risk his life, and so doesn't gain XP from the vast majority of those encounters. When emergencies happen, when he is surprised, when a powerful force penetratest to the heart of town, then he gains XP...but these are unusual, since most of the conflicts are not hard to drive off, even though they do take their toll on the populace.

The second reason that we don't see 9th level Adepts, but we do see 9th level commoners, is migration. In this loosely feudal system, the capital sends their low-level folk out to the fringes (where they count as 'population') to help control the monstrous risk. This is where the fighter and the cleric and the bard come from -- the Kingdom, not the Locale. These folk in turn probably train a handful of alcolytes, and deal with a greater number of threats. After they've served their term in the realm, they go back home to the kingdom, and are replaced by new low-level folk. So the XP gained by the fighters is eventually negated, because the fighters leave before they gain many levels. They leave for the city, where they were born, and they take with them those who show impressive skill -- those who gained levels. The city attracts high-level people not because of the danger of living in a city, but because a lot of those high-level people originally came from the rurual areas, or at least served some time out there protecting them from the monsters. The same is true of PC and NPC classes, but, because of their frequency, commoners are often the last chose. Toothless Joe has probably seen more than a few scamps take up the sword and leave for the Kingdom, scamps which undoubtedly are higher than 9th level by now, but he's been passed over for one reason or another (those 'all 10's' statistics may be the reason). He may be one of the most experienced members of the town, but the town has a population that is not stagnant. Kids are born, youths are trained, protectors from the Kingdom come in, and promising kids who gain levels are taken away by the cities, the price the community pays for being beholden to a king. Potentially, the kid will come back later, as a higher-level fighter, to protect the land he once called home. In this system, spellcasters are going to be gathered up earlier than martial professions, because spells are more useful to a society as a whole than a strong sword arm (Which still is not to be discounted -- they need swords too, they just need spells more badly.) The adepts that reach 3rd or 4th level are taken back to the city by the cleric that was sent to help protect them, so that those who stay in the community are the low-levels, and those talented individuals are taken away to serve in the Kings's Own Mook Patrol. The warriors who reach 5th or 6th have the same thing happen to them. This Mook Patrol becomes citizens of the city, and maybe adventurers, and maybe raise children that come back to the home thorp and protect it once again.

A reason we don't see high-level adepts, but we do see high-level commoners, is the same reason that the kobold sorcerer bites the dust before the kobold barbarian -- precieved threat. Magic-users are not only weaker than martial classes, they're also potentially more destructive, so those who raid the village concentrate on taking them out. It's hard to gain levels when you're dead, and the cleric is the target of the *smart* goblin warlord. So there are higher attrition rates, meaning they don't have as much of a chance to raise to high levels. Toothless Joe, on the other hand, became powerful while protecting his adept friends. By the time the goblins realized ol' Joe was a threat, he was beyond their ability to easily destroy.

And this same reason is why we don't see 7th level orc barbarians crushing every village they come accross (though certainly they crush one or two). They're not involved in the fighting every day, they're living fat off the efforts of others. They're the leaders, they're the skillfull, they're too important to risk in the raids on a Podunk warrior getting a lucky crit. Not every 1st level party encounters these 7th level barbarians just because they're in orc land, it's a bit crazy to assume that the town nessecarily would.

Elder-Basilisk · Aug 17, 2004

Al'Kelhar said:
I agree with your argument, which simply boils down to "because D&D is not specific about real world effects of its spells, how can one conclude that a particular spell will have a particular effect". This misses the point of my argument, which is that any world in which magic is as all-pervasive as it purports to be in D&D is exceedingly unlikely to look anything like some pseudo-medieval traditional fantasy world.

That may be your argument but when I reach your conclusions, they go a lot further than that: specifically, that it is not credible that a world with a DMG magic-level could look like a pseudo-medieval traditional fantasy world. I don't buy that--well, I certainly don't buy it on the basis of magic. I might buy it on the basis that the technologies and social structures that developed from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment were a product of assumptions and worldviews that were only possible because of the legacy of widespread Christian belief and that a society based on a semi-polytheistic D&D-style pantheon would not be likely to follow the same trajectory. I might also believe that the pseudo-medieval traditional fantasy world is non-credible because its many concessions to modern idealism--particularly feminism--create social structures that are only plausible in an era when technology puts less of a premium on physical strength and size and medical technology makes childbirth easy and reduces infant and child mortality rates, and contraceptive and prophylactic technology has somewhat separated sex from reproduction. (And even with all that, the modern social assumptions that govern pseudo-medieval fantasy worlds may not be able to produce a stable modern society--the jury is still out on that).

So, if you want to say that it's unlikely that a world in which magic is all-pervasive would produce a psuedo-medieval society, I can buy it. If you want to say it renders a pseudo-medieval society more implausible than the pseudo elements of pseudo-medieval society make it, I don't.

Of course, the most dangerous thing our ancestors faced was the humble disease-causing antigen. It is naturally impossible to compare the demographic effects of smallpox or influenza to raiding goblins and assorted evil creatures extant in the "D&D world". What is most important to realise is that the very existence of creatures at least as intelligent as humans and with access to magic would have dramatic and far-reaching effects on the structure of human society - if such a society could even exist.

Actually, I would figure that non-humanoid and not necessarily intelligent creatures like wyverns, griffons, and undead would have a bigger impact. The difference between a neighboring tribe of orcs and a neighboring tribe of scythians or other barbarians may not be as great as is commonly supposed. After all, their raiding would hardly be anything our ancestors didn't experience and the significance of their non-humanity is belied by:

A. the fact that our ancestors weren't really so sure all humans were equal anyway. Greeks/Barbarians, House of Islam/House of War, and all that. Would anti-orc prejudice be stronger than anti-semitism? It's somewhat difficult to tell. (Especially since ancient caricatures of other races often made them sound like orcs anyway).
B. the fact that given the Star-Trek style sexual compatibility of standard D&D, there's not necessarily a biological distinction between races like orcs and humans anyway. If you can have a fertile half-orc, one of the arguments for humans and orcs being the same species is satisfied.

So, since our ancestors treated their enemies like monsters anyway and the racial distinction between humans and other humanoids isn't as great as is commonly supposed, I don't think the existence of rampaging humanoids is necessarily a greater challenge to the pseudo-medieval order than the existence of rampaging huns was to the real medieval order.

On the other hand, wyverns, dragons, dire bears, behirs, ankheg, etc all challenge the status of humanity (and demi-humanity) at the top of the food-chain in a way that RL animals never did. I don't think they have any analogue and that would certainly require an accounting.

"Dude", thanks for the history lesson. It's always fun to extemporise from historical accidents - "turning points in history", so called - but then responding to the effect of "well that's bollocks because it's overly simplistic and makes unfounded assumptions" isn't very polite.

And it might have been inappropriate of me to do so if you had actually been extemporising from historical accidents and saying that "this might happen which could lead to this" instead of saying that infant mortality rates would go down and therefore technology would develop and that therefore in a space of a couple hundred years, we would have a modern magitech world. However, since your post was not exploring the possibilities left by historical accidents but rather asserting that the pseudo-medieval world was non-credible because such things would inevitably happen, such a response is entirely appropriate.

To say that "we're lucky to be here; the chances of life emerging on this planet and evolving to a degree where it is capable of realising how infintesimally small the chances of its very existence really are, are infintesimally small," is not particularly insightful.

Perhaps not if you stop there. However, if you go on to realize that it's perfectly plausible that Progress could have halted at any time or even have returned to barbarism, one would reach an insight that seems to have eluded you: that, it's not particularly more credible for the magic-saturated world to advance than to stagnate. A magic-saturated, decadent, stagnant, pseudo-medieval world in decline is just as credible as a magic-saturated world brimming with possibilities that is an unstoppable engine of Progress. That point vitiates the central tenet of your argument.

To reiterate the central tenet of my argument, if magic is as prevalent in human society as the D&D literature suggests, the validity of that society remaining in some romanticised quasi-medieval state of development for any appreciable length of time needs to be seriously questioned.

I don't see why. IRL, society didn't remain in anything like the romanticised quasi-medieval state of development for that long either. 1300 AD was dramatically different from 900 AD and 1500 AD was dramatically different from 1300 AD. "Society" doesn't need to remain in the same state of development for a millenium in order for one to run a campaign in it.

The "magic as technology" example is simply one example of what might occur, and what might occur in a very short time frame. The complication of the existence other intelligent life simply adds to one's reservations about the sustainability of the D&D "model".

Your "very short" time frame is possible though certainly much faster than anything that happened IRL. Given the improbability of RL developments over a much longer time frame--and, more importantly, the dependence of RL technological developments on RL cultural, religious, and social developments (I can imagine a Magitech Max Weber writing "Capitalism and the work ethic of St. Cuthbert" but I doubt that a single member of a pantheon would have such a dramatic impact upon cultures)--I don't think your "magic as technology" example is credible enough to render the D&D "model" less sustainable than it needs to be.

And, of course, anything that happens significantly slower than your very short time-frame need not create any reservations about the sustainability of the D&D "model." It simply points to the need to describe D&D societies as societies in the midst of a slow transition to something else (what is uncertain--it could be anything) rather than as static societies. If ancient armor tops out at chain mail (or splint mail) and there are no ancient magical heavy crossbows and plate armor is a new development then the world is just less pseudo, not less medieval.

Let me be clear on this. I play D&D because it's escapism. It's fantasy. I've attempted to rationalise some of the more significant consequences of abundant magic by running low-magic campaigns. Kamikaze Midget's view of the Average D&D Commoner and the classes and levels of the people around them is surprisingly similar to my own. But I don't try to analyse the society on a deep level because you very soon start asking "why does it look like this and not something completely different?"

And, while you apparently think that's a pointless question because the answer is "it ought to look completely different, this is totally incredible," I think that's a question that can be answered and that the answers--incomplete and perhaps inconclusive as they may be since it's always possible that things could have been different--can be very helpful to creating a believable and entertaining campaign. If one answers, "my world is pseudo-medieval because, like Russia under the Tsars, it's a corrupt and unjust society where a peasant with no goat who is given a wish wishes that his neighbor's goat will die rather than wishing that he is given a goat himself," that can create a believable world that has an entirely different feel than a world where the answer is "my world is pseudo-medieval because King Edmund recently unified the territory of St. Cuthbertsburg and the Westmark and has abolished the blood feud and appointed Justicars to administer the King's Justice--a more or less uniform code of laws that replaces the patchwork of traditions and arbitrary pronouncements of the barons; if things go the way King Edmund wishes, the world will probably be pseudo-Renaissance in 200 years; if his reforms generate too much resistance, the necromancer king of Stromgald will capitalize on the the weakness of the king's lands and I can use Midnight for my next campaign." Both campaigns would use the DMG assumptions but there would be a dramatic difference to the feel of each campaign. That feel comes from asking the question: "Why does it look like this and not something completely different?"

kigmatzomat · Aug 18, 2004

Elder-Basilisk said:
I'm with you up to the stray animals and minor criminals. Notarizing taxes and harvest tallies is a wonderful use of Arcane Mark.

For stray animals, people really only care about livestock and for livestock, you need something that'll last longer than a month.

I'm thinking marking livestock that have broken out of pens and are doing damage to their neighbor's property but the owner won't fess up. The mage puts the invisible mark on the animal after it's been caught a second time, they wait for the animal to "wander" home and then the mage goes around looking for his mark. The offender would be charged for the damages and fined for failing to come forward. The mage would split the fines with the village/noble.

For criminals, arcane mark would only be used where it is intended to be temporary. Otherwise branding is cheaper, more permanent, and more painful, all of which are advantages when punishing criminals.

Think of the lagabout who isn't *quite* criminally shirking off or the farmer who didn't oil the communal plow poperly; this would be a temporary mark of shame. Serious criminals would, of course, be properly punished.

Snapdragyn · Aug 18, 2004

And it hinges on the only thouroughly codified way of gaining XP in D&D: risking your life in encounters. Encounters that don't risk your life don't give XP....

This assumes a world where no XP is given for noncombat encounters. If the campaign awards story or roleplaying XP to the PCs, then it should also do the same for NPCs (following on our extrapolation of PC rules to the world at large).

The second reason that we don't see 9th level Adepts, but we do see 9th level commoners, is migration.

I'm with you on this point. The cities would represent a major brawn- & brain-drain on the rural areas, just as they drain away the food. The payment for this drain would be, as you mention, protection.

On the other hand, wyverns, dragons, dire bears, behirs, ankheg, etc all challenge the status of humanity (and demi-humanity) at the top of the food-chain in a way that RL animals never did. I don't think they have any analogue and that would certainly require an accounting.

I'm not so certain of this. I think this very much gets into the game mechanics vs. realism gap. What are 'hit points'? What is the real damage a tiger's bite would do?

To grab 1 quick example: MM lists the attack of a rhino as 2d6+12, which would be a max of 24hp. A 5th level NPC barbarian with average hp & no CON bonus could thus survive a full damage (non-crit) gore from a rhino, while no one IRL can survive a full damage (figuring the RL equivalent would be through the center of the chest, rather than a leg) goring by a rhino.

I think D&D rules severely underestimate the dangers of 'mundane' creatures of the sorts which our ancestors would've encountered; if you take this discrepancy into account the survival risks they faced are probably much closer to those encountered in a D&D world than what we might think.

I think quite likely our ancestors did face & survive dangers just as severe in the one-on-one theatre as occurs in D&D (though certainly nothing like a dragon's AE breath weapon).

Elder-Basilisk · Aug 18, 2004

Snapdragyn said:
I'm not so certain of this. I think this very much gets into the game mechanics vs. realism gap. What are 'hit points'? What is the real damage a tiger's bite would do?

To grab 1 quick example: MM lists the attack of a rhino as 2d6+12, which would be a max of 24hp. A 5th level NPC barbarian with average hp & no CON bonus could thus survive a full damage (non-crit) gore from a rhino, while no one IRL can survive a full damage (figuring the RL equivalent would be through the center of the chest, rather than a leg) goring by a rhino.

I think D&D rules severely underestimate the dangers of 'mundane' creatures of the sorts which our ancestors would've encountered; if you take this discrepancy into account the survival risks they faced are probably much closer to those encountered in a D&D world than what we might think.

I think quite likely our ancestors did face & survive dangers just as severe in the one-on-one theatre as occurs in D&D (though certainly nothing like a dragon's AE breath weapon).

Right but, if you look at the RL world, you don't find anything that specifically hunts people. Lions, tigers, and bears sometimes do but people aren't their primary prey and it's generally old and wek animals that go after people. Sharks go after people on a fairly regular basis (at least as I understand it, the last I read, the great shark debate had turned against the rehabilitators) but, since we're not really aquatic creatures, that mostly impacts the surfing community. In the D&D world, the bestiary includes a LOT of large land predators from Remorhaz and Frost Worms to Bullettes, Wyverns, Chimera, dragons, and sphynxes. It also includes things like vampires that specifically prey on people.

So, I'm not thinking we've only got tigers IRL, but in fantasyland, they've got chimeras and wyverns. Rather, my point is that we don't really have any natural predators IRL, but in fantasyland we do. That seems like it would make a huge difference. A rhino may be as dangerous as a chimera but rhinos don't generally go out looking for people to gore. Chimeras do go out looking for people to eat. The world would, I think, be quite different if predators in the great white shark class roamed the land freely. That's what I'm getting at. It's not the individual threat level but rather the difference in behavior patterns that makes a difference.

der_kluge · Aug 18, 2004

The thing that gets me is this:

If you build a party of 4 characters (cleric, fighter, wizard, rogue) at 1st level, and take their starting gold: 5d4x10, 6d4x10, 3d4x10, and 5d4x10 and average that out, you get 125, 150, 75 and 125 gold pieces each.

Assuming that these individuals started in a village, hamlet, or even a thorp, where the heck did they get that kind of money? A first level cleric in a thorp could buy the most expensive thing in the whole freaking town three times over.

The cost of a stay in a poor quality inn is 2sp per day. A first level fighter could afford to put everyone in an 80-person thorp in an inn for over a week. Why wouldn't a first level bard (with his 100gp) buy 2,500 mugs of ale for everyone in a large town?

I mean, jeez, a first level bard could, if he wanted, stand in the middle of town and yell out, "A free mug of ale on me, for everyone in the entire town!" Who wouldn't love the guy after that?

A first level rogue could hire every laborer in a large town, pay them *more* than the standard 1sp piece per day, let's say 15cp per day (1.5sp), and could hire 833 laborer/hours. If you assume that a hamlet of 200 people is 50% laborers, that's 100 laborers. This rogue could hire them *all*, paying 150% wages for 8 solid days. Let's hope the local noble isn't trying to get a castle built or anything like that.

That's some serious economic power, folks.

der_kluge · Aug 18, 2004

D&D is a game of two worlds - the world of the NPC, and the world of the PC. The first world makes a lot of sense. You've got commoners struggly to get by, hamlets and villages of farmers and laborers eeking out an existence of meager earnings, and a hard life. This world makes sense, and we can relate to it.

Then you throw PCs in there with their unbelievable wealth and absurd proportions into this mix. A 5th level PC could *easily* walk into a decent-sized hamlet and proclaim, "for my next action, I shall buy this town, and all that is in it." I mean, the wealth scales absurdly.

Snapdragyn · Aug 18, 2004

Rather, my point is that we don't really have any natural predators IRL, but in fantasyland we do.

Fair enough, though of course IRL we did have natural predators -- we simply killed them all. Even today, those species which are capable of preying on humans survive only because we regularly kill those individuals who exhibit predatory behavior specifically targeting humans; a freak attack may be tolerated, but if a lion or tiger 'man-eater' appears, it is hunted down & killed. Thousands of years of such behavior on our part has changed things quite a bit from what we'd see if we considered the dangers faced by our more distant ancestors.

Perhaps, then, the development of the particular civilization which developed in medieval Europe owes more to the hunting practices of humans in that area over the previous 40 or 50 thousand years than we've previously considered!